This is a great question! I too have come to the realization that marketing is highly damaging to society. Commercials, ads, spam, flyers, etc. So much waste and invasion of privacy.

I’ve been trying to imagine what a world without marketing would look like for months.

In cetain areas, the consumer experience is greatly improved. No interruptions of TV or podcasts. Less bandwidth, ram, and cpu used when browsing web pages. No invasive individual tracking anywhere.

But the two major changes that require additional consideration:

1. How do businesses today that rely on ad revenue (web search, podcasts, etc) continue to exist and pay salaries and other expenses? A. These would all require a move to direct payment models. Either a usage fee or a subscription fee.

2. How do businesses source customers? Especially important for new businesses or new products that customers dont know about.

A. I dont have a clear solution here. But I would like to see two possible ways that are not mutually exclusive:

a. The Phone Book. It basically went extinct when the internet and web search became ubiquitous. But I’d like to see it return.

b. Service Brokers. Similar to above but businesses or humans in the loop to assist with supporting mapping of request to service provider.

With a., its pretty easy to make this physical, standardized and regulated to be fair/utilitarian

With b., it will require conscious effort to regulate and ensure consumers arent tracked and no business is given and unfair advantage.

Assuming innovation, it seems like there would still be a need for some way for producers to inform potential consumers. I’d love to see advertising move from “create demand” to “provide information”. Not at all sure how that might come about though.

Meanwhile, I personally get by just fine with blocking as many ads as possible, which is almost all of them, and going out and searching when I need information. But that probably doesn’t scale to busier people.

James Tiptree Jr. wrote a short story once called “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” set in a world where advertising was outlawed. The companies uses influencers to use their products in public, but they keep complete control of these influencers in the dark cyberpunk dystopian way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_Who_Was_Plugged_In

Fully automated luxury gay space communism

Or do we even need it?

i definitely get the sense that this is one of those things where there has to be an absolutist solution or none at all (at least without huge changes to the world and the incentives to perversely advertise). i don’t know where you’d begin to draw a line on what is acceptable or unacceptable advertising–or in what venues–past “word of mouth is fine”. to be honest, a lot of my shopping is already done by word of mouth because it’s impossible to rely on anything else without getting made a rube, and that feels like a really good indication of where this’ll all eventually decay.

A world without advertising and marketing is a world without persuasion. These two concepts by themselves were never the problem, as they’re just a means to increase awareness and demand for a product or service. To me it seems that you instead take issue with a consumerist society.

I think our surroundings would be much cleaner. We’d have less flyers, billboards, tarps, etc. We would live in a quieter world filled with less distraction.

As much as I hate it however, I agree that it’s a necessary evil, but maybe it could be executed more responsibly. I personally prefer “buy it for life” discussions, or product reviews by experts, or those gradings according to sustainability. So maybe in a non-capitalist society, adverts would be more informative than just, “look at this shiny thing, don’t you want it?”

Isn’t the price advertisers pay driven completely by the intermediaries (google and such) and advertising costs could continue to grow? Can’t content producers unite (unionize) and get their piece?

I’m 100% against ads. I pay to not see them. I think advertisers would pay 10x for 👀 compared to what they currently pay.

Public bulletin boards are forbidden in, iirc, Brazil, or at least in the capital. Made for a very different view.

Money is not evil - it’s the love of money that crosses a line, pushing all other concerns to the side for the sake of that singular goal.

Advertising lets you know which products may be of interest to you, and “connects” you to places/things/products/whatever.

It’s like fat on a person. You NEED some of it, and quite frankly the human species wouldn’t survive without it (especially babies & milk), but we have managed to take a good thing and GROTESQUELY over-blow it, all out of proportion to what is needed. And then people push back, and some even go to the opposite extreme and become malnourished & bulimic.

TLDR: “All things in moderation”.

I personally hate advertising. Most companies that advertise are more expensive due to the cost of advertising being built into their prices.

I believe the metrics are made up to make companies think they’re making money by spending money on it.

If there were enforced laws for the marketing to be 100% truthful and non deceptive.

I’ll just state some pros and cons of one hypothetical scenario in which there are virtually no advertisements. What defines an advertisement exactly may be up to date but I’ll go with what I think.

Pros: Much more quiet with much less noise. Relations and connections and groups would be much tighter. There would still be heated discourse but it might be less polarized.

Cons: It would be harder to connect with people and services from farther away, because you mostly couldn’t hear about them.

Introducing the death penalty for even minor violations of false advertising would go a long way. Mandating regular scientific research comparing various products along different KPIs as a precondition before even being allowed to advertise would be another.

When you buy a car with 30,000 components, do you get the failure specifications for all 30,000 components? They don’t advertise that some minor component exists that will cost a few thousand dollars to replace, because of the way it was been tucked away, do they?

The only reason people buy products is, because of lack of anything better or ignorance about the market.

A more high tech version would be if everyone had their own Star Trek Enterprise-D in which the “Computer” has solutions for almost every problem except completely new ones. For example, you can ask such a computer to design a new warp reactor, but you can’t ask it to design a new transwarp reactor.

In a future with an AI as advanced as in Star Trek, there’s no point in having a human still in the loop, however.

Don’t hold your breath for such a future, however, because the first version has no political support (people just love to lie and cheat, which is what marketing is in practice) and the second version requires technological progress of probably nine orders of magnitude if it is not outright impossible to begin with. That is, one can program a computer to come up with answers for all real-world questions, but that doesn’t mean you haven’t died of old age before the answer is returned.

I considered it a nessisary evil for a long time, then I released most purchases are unnecessary.